Her hand still stung. It hadn't been bravery though, not really. She'd punched the wolf more out of panic rather than anything else. Still, she'd saved Red's sorry ass and repaid his favour.
A life for a life. She owed him nothing now.
The throbbing pain in her empty eye socket seemed almost mild in comparison to her other wounds. Her arm burned every time she flexed it. The dozens of marks and bruises littered over her body felt like they had been doused in gasoline. The new gash across her face, layered on top of the old one, stung the worse of all.
She studied Red's face in the pale steel-edged light that the section of the maze they were in provided. He looked like a child, an innocent child, a sweet summer child who'd been ripped away from a sheltered life and tossed out into the real world. His skin was almost snow-white in the soft silver glow. She'd managed to clean most of the blood coating him away, and only now did she realise just how young he appeared. Although he seemed around the same age as her, he looked so much younger.
He's too young to be doing drugs, she thought. And too old to be living a space fantasy. Other than the obvious hallucinations, of course, there were no other signs indicating Red being high on something. She wondered if, perhaps, he was perfectly lucid---but simply had an overactive imagination.
There was no way the skinny boy in her lap was an alien. Aliens didn't exist, after all. Alisa knew that.
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Alisa couldn't breathe.
Her eyelids fluttered open to complete darkness. Her heart raced into overdrive, thudding out of her chest as panic reigned dominant within her mind. There was something pressing down on her torso and abdomen---something just heavy enough to cut off most of her air supply.
Sometime during her nightmare-riddled sleep, the maze's pearly light had faded.
"Get...off...me..." she wheezed. For a moment, she wondered if the sleep paralysis demon that often haunted her had come back. It did that sometimes, especially when she was scared. And in the pitch-black maze, she definitely was scared.
But soon, silver irises lit up the dark, and Alisa realised the thing on her was not her resident demon. She would have preferred the sleep paralysis. Becca was straddling her chest, hands pinning her shoulders to the ground. The girl's eyes, staring directly into her face, glowed with radioactive malice.
"Get off me, Becca," Alisa repeated, her voice a breathless gasp, the oxygen sucked out of her lungs from pressure and fear. She was crippled in the dark, and wasn't sure if she would be able to hold her own in a fight. Although Becca seemed weak, she was unpredictable. Alisa didn't know what the girl had up her sleeve.
Know thy enemy.
She didn't.
"Is this about Lennox?" Alisa managed to get out. It had to be about Lennox. Becca had been obviously smitten with him, and having him taken away from her like that...it was probably enough to make anyone mad. "If it's about Lennox, you do know his death wasn't my fault, right?"
